Assistant Professor Paul Romatschke of the University of Colorado Boulder physics department will receive a five-year, $750,000 grant as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program, created to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce with top young researchers.

Romatschke was among 68 winners selected nationwide from a pool of 850 applicants from universities and national laboratories. Romatschke is the eighth CU-Boulder faculty member to be selected for the three-year-old program. Other schools with winners included Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.

Romatschke’s proposal involves using a recent development in string theory to create a dynamic model for interactions that occur just after the collision of two heavy ion particles during experiments at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider. The results will help to eliminate many unknowns in current hydrodynamic models of experimental data from the RHIC and the LHC.

Romatschke also won a 2012 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship for $50,000 in February to pursue research in relativistic fluid dynamics and its application to high-energy nuclear physics. He was on of two CU-Boulder faculty to receive a Sloan Fellowship this year, along with Assistant Professor Robin Dowell of the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department and the BioFrontiers Institute.

Colorado Classroom provides ground-level reporting on what’s going on in the state’s public schools and on college campuses, looking at people, places, issues, trends and innovative approaches to education.